When I’ve tried to explain this concept in the past, I’ve always said microintimacies. I think I did this as a sort of corrective to the concept of microaggressions, an idea that was once useful but which has lately, as concepts will in our cultural climate, crept beyond the point of usefulness into the realm of absurdity. Since going monk and leaving America, I’ve decided to leave American-style identity politics behind. And so with that goes microintimacies. Instead, I will write about small intimacies.

I’m not sure when I started striving for small intimacies in my life. I expect it was about the same time I became aware of social interactions as such and, more to the point, of small talk. I’m sure I was an adult, then, because kids do not have social interactions qua social interactions and they certainly don’t make small talk. Not really. Not the kids I knew anyway. But then again I grew up at a different time (didn’t we all). Kids do not need to seek out small intimacies in their engagement with others because intimacy comes more naturally to them and their talk is usually pretty frank.

As adults, our social interactions become much more rigid and circumscribed. We tend to worry a lot about what we say and do and how we might be perceived by others. Likewise, we tend to get caught up in our ideas about what others ought to say and do, and we start to believe in the prejudices and fantasies we project onto them. We develop habits of mind and speech and gesture that accord with what we imagine to be the appropriate way to interact with one another. And then, from behind our self-constructed and self-perpetuated barriers from others, we yearn for connection, for intimacy.

But intimacy is dangerous. It’s risky. It involves negotiating with other people whose own ideas and fantasies and desires and taboos and expectations for appropriate social interaction might have nothing to do with your own. And vice versa. Your projections onto others may not, and probably don’t, correspond with who they are at all. And, also, vice versa. So human beings, in their intimate relationships tend to keep it close to home. They stick with their family relations and their romantic partners.

Family relations are relatively easy, particularly if you share or, at least, believe you share, genetic material. Negotiating intimacy with family members might not even register as negotiation. It’s just what you do. You’re stuck with your family. Or, at least, there seems to be a lot of consensus among people that this is the case.

Intimacy with romantic partners is a bit trickier to negotiate. You are not stuck with your boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse or whomever. Human beings as a species are serial monogamists. We tend to move from one intimate sexual partner to another over the course of our lives.

Long-term intimacy or large intimacy is not only dangerous or risky, it also takes a lot of effort and energy. Anyone who’s ever been in a serious long-term relationship, which I think is probably everyone who is an adult, knows that this shit is difficult and exhausting. We do it, of course, because it’s also rewarding. But it’s pretty obvious that real-deal intimacy with lots of different people who aren’t family is going to be tough going, which is what the show Big Love was about.

All of this is pretty obvious, I think. But what’s less obvious is what to do when the sorts of rigid and circumscribed and, frankly, lifeless forms of social interaction that are pretty much standard so far as I can tell are absolute anathema to how you want to be in the world with others. What do you do when making small talk makes you feel like you’re leading a life that’s not worth living? How do you break through the standard forms of social interaction to have meaningful connections with others that have no need of exceeding that moment and becoming something more?

The solution to this is to cultivate a disposition toward others that creates opportunities for what I call small intimacies.

Although I’m certain it didn’t originate with me, small intimacy is a term I have a special usage for: It describes the goal of my effort in nearly all of my interactions with others to break through formality and convention. It also describes being alive to these moments when I’m not striving for them. Because if you are really being there in life, small intimacies can happen all the time.

—I’m aware, now that I’ve written it, that “really being there” will have an unmistakeable Heideggerian ring to it for students of philosophy. And the conditions for small intimacies I’m describing are a lot like Heideggerian authenticity, if you want to think of it that way. Of course, many philosophers will want to argue with this point, but those sorts of arguments don’t interest me, which is why I’m neither an academic nor a public intellectual. I am merely a guy who writes long and elaborate posts on Facebook, mostly about bar girls. But back to the point.—

Here’s an example of a small intimacy:

Meeting Wassana in a bar in Hua Hin and sitting down to help peel onions. Funnily enough, I sat down with the little girl at the restaurant last night to help peel onions too, although, I promise, onion peeling isn’t really my thing. This is pretty unexpected behavior, and I’m not suggesting that anyone can simply do the unexpected and other people will enjoy it and want to take selfies and become friends. But with effort and trial and error, it is possible to experience a small intimacy with someone who moments before was a total stranger simply by being open to interacting outside of convention. These kinds small intimacies can, of course, grow into larger, long-term intimacies. But what’s so fucking cool about them is that they don’t have to. Not at all. There’s no pressure on small intimacies to be anything but what they are. Small and momentary.

Here’s another example of a small intimacy:

Riding the mighty Honda CB300R we’d rented through the, frankly, pretty hair-raising Bangkok traffic and stopping next to a guy on a Honda motorcycle. Of course, the apparent connection is our mutual appreciation for mighty Honda motorcycles. But the small intimacy is given life when this guy, a total stranger separated by nationality, ethnicity, language, culture, class, and a thousand other things besides, gives me a fist bump before we both tear ass away from the light three seconds before it turns to green, which is the Thailand way.

It’s a small thing. And I’m aware that this whole small intimacy thing can be taken as pretty superficial. But it’s the small and seemingly superficial moments and interactions that matter. Because these are the connections that, when paid attention to and handled with care, add up to a life well lived. The real point is that family and romantic relationships are fine. This kind of intimacy can be intense and rewarding. But if you set the moments of familial and romantic intimacy in your life against all the other moments when it’s possible to have smaller intimacies, the moments of small intimacy are going to add up to much more. No contest. And these two forms of intimacy are not mutually exclusive. You can have them both.

Two examples of small intimacies plus some pretty vague advice to behave irregularly are obviously not going to do a great job of conveying what I want to say about the importance of small intimacies. Better to look around and take note of the people who appear more deeply engaged with others, even people they’ve just met or will interact with only once, people whose lives seem to be more meaningfully lived than other lives. I’ll bet that you’ll find they are open to and cultivate the opportunities for lots of small intimacies.

Likewise, pay attention to how some people shield themselves from others, protecting themselves with formality and convention, play-acting through life because really being there with others is too risky. You will likely find that they need some small intimacies in their lives. Maybe they could use some help peeling onions or a fist bump.

Give it a try. See where it takes you.